


No

by what_a_dork_fish



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall - Fandom
Genre: :c, Angst, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Suicide Attempt, no happy endings here, no one likes Q
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 10:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10435596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_a_dork_fish/pseuds/what_a_dork_fish
Summary: Caffeine-fueled bullshit while listening to my angriest music.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Caffeine-fueled bullshit while listening to my angriest music.

R is not welcome, has never been welcome, will never be welcome. He is an outsider, an outlier. He is a black-hat-turned-white and no one trusts him.

They only took him because he was too dangerous to leave alone. They stuck him in a cell, forced him to undo all the damage he’d inflicted, and then they brought him to this… Q-branch. The Quartermaster, Boothroyd, had said, “I have a job for you, son.”

R had said nothing.

“It will test you.”

Nothing has tested him since he was in nappies.

“It’ll be thankless and no one will trust you.”

He doesn’t want trust.

“You’ll be under watch every moment, but we’ll give you free reign. On everything but us.”

He’d twitched. “…Everything?”

Boothroyd had smiled, and R had found a ruthless soul to match his own. “Absobloodylutely.”

~

R is hated.

He is too good at his job. He is too clever, too quiet, too obedient, too ruthless. He does what he’s told, as long as what he’s told is interesting. He does no menial chores, takes no punishments. Boothroyd hates him too, often casts him dark and suspicious looks. But R is too clever. No one can ever pin anything on him.

He does no harm to the United Kingdom. The rest of the world, however… oh, it is his playground. He makes fools of corrupt governments. He exposes his former “friends”, because they would do the same in his position. He aids in the arrest of foreign leaders. He chooses sides and plays the world like chess.

All of this, he does from his computer in Q-branch.

Sometimes he takes over handling a mission. He is R, after all. The agents hate him, too, but he never leads them wrong. It is safe here, in the bowels of MI6. He will not lose this precarious safety.

~

He is walking briskly down a hall, tapping away on his tablet, when they jump him.

They have been threatening to for months. He has mastered several forms of self-defense in that time, and he puts his training to good use. Nevertheless, fists and feet land, and he begins to feel it. There are ten of them, and they are trained, too. They didn’t expect him to fight back, but they have numbers.

He fights dirty. Someone screams. He doesn’t care. They won’t stop until he is dead. He will fight until then.

Suddenly, two others enter the fray. They seem to be on his side, but they do not break bones like he does; they simply and efficiently remove people from the equation. Finally, the only three standing are R and the two newcomers.

They are both taller than him, broader, blond; one has blue eyes and the other has green. They are looking at R with curious expressions. He looks around, finds his tablet (remarkably intact), picks it up, and begins to walk away.

“Your lip is bleeding,” one of the blonds calls after him.

“Yes, I know,” he answers over his shoulder, and turns the corner.

~

“So that’s him.”

James sighs and looks around at the ten groaning junior agents sprawled on the floor. “Yes, I suppose it was,” he murmurs.

Alec grins. “Fights like a wildcat,” he comments.

“Looks like a kitten.”

“Those ones are the most fun.”

James sighs again at the familiar glint in Alec’s eye. “You can’t have him. He’s a black hat.”

“Even better. Come on, let’s get out of here, before the little ones wake up.”

~

R is no longer simply hated; he is feared.

He walks into Q-branch with a split lip, two black eyes, and a limp, but he is calm and efficient and pays no attention to the pain. He’s had worse.

Boothroyd calls R into his office five minutes after R sits down. He pushes his chair back, locks his computer, and walks over.

“What the bloody hell were you thinking?!” Boothroyd bursts out, glaring, as soon as the soundproof door is closed. “You’ve made enemies of the whole agency now!”

“With respect, sir, everyone was already an enemy,” R answers matter of factly.

For some reason, that makes Boothroyd pause, and squint at him. R returns his gaze steadily. Everyone is an enemy. He learned that when his mother, the only person he ever loved, tried to drown him. Everyone wants you dead for some reason or another. Fight back, or you’ll find out which Hell is the real one.

“Haven’t you got _any_ allies?” Boothroyd asks softly.

R shakes his head, gingerly. “They all hate me. It’s better this way.”

“Better for who?”

All R can do is shrug.

~

His wounds heal. No one attacks him again.

The blond men, he knows now. 006 and 007. They seem fascinated by R, cautiously. He ignores them. They hang around Q-branch, ask questions about R. They follow him around sometimes. He finds out later that they’re the reason no one has tried to knife him yet. He shrugs when he learns this, and moves on with his life.

And then he’s handler for 007.

At first it’s just the boring monotony of ordering the agent around. Then 007 breaks from R, and he frowns, but adapts to the change in plans. Then 007 breaks the plan, again, and again, and again. R grows angry; what, does 007 think R doesn’t know what he’s doing? Does he think this is _funny_?

“Obviously, you can do this on your own,” R finally snaps. “Goodbye, 007.”

“What? R, wait–”

But R has already disconnected.

Boothroyd is angry, of course. R lays out his arguments patiently, and waits for Boothroyd to have that heart attack he’s been threatening ever since R entered the picture, four years ago now. But he doesn’t. Instead, he turns on the comms and barks, “007, report!”

“Thank _fucking_ christ! Whip that fucking arsehole of a child, will you?” 007 spits furiously amidst a hail of gunfire. “I’m pinned down. Am I on camera?”

R clicks a few keys and 007 pops up on screen. “Yes,” Boothroyd grinds out, worry tightening his face. R finds this fascinating, that Boothroyd… what is the word? Cares. Boothroyd cares if these overgrown children live or die. R doesn’t. But he sits quietly and does what Boothroyd tells him to.

~

He isn’t allowed to handle any more missions. He’s fine with that. It gives him more time to work on his engineering, coding, and hacking. It doesn’t seem possible for everyone to hate him even more, but they do. 007 is something of a favorite.

R remains on his toes for a full year after the incident where he left 007 for dead. He doesn’t even relax in his cell, where he spends his nights when he isn’t pulling all-nighters on difficult or fiddly bits of work. He cat-naps. He takes to testing his food and tea for poison. He remains wary always, although not quite paranoid.

Suddenly, on the one year anniversary of the Incident, 007 enters Q-branch and heads straight for R. People scurry out of his way, all with triumphant smirks and evil glee glittering in their eyes. They think 007 is about to kill R.

R doesn’t ever turn from his computer. “Hello, 007,” he greets the man absently.

“Hello, R,” 007 replies coolly. He watches R work for a moment, then asks suddenly, “What’s your favorite color?”

“Green,” R answers, picking a color at random. “Why?”

“No reason.” And 007 walks out of Q-branch.

~

006 brings R a package two days later, grinning like a shark, all teeth and coldness. He sets the package down on a corner of R’s desk and says cheerfully, “Special delivery, courtesy of the double-0 program.”

R looks up at him, patiently awaiting explanation.

But 006 doesn’t want to talk. He simply wiggles his fingers in a mocking wave and saunters out of Q-branch.

R doesn’t open the package–a plain brown shipping box–until five minutes before he’s to be escorted back to his cell. He finds a boxcutter somewhere and opens the box.

Inside is a cardigan of a deep emerald green. R frowns, takes out his scanner, and touches the device to the cardigan. The scanner senses no unpleasant surprises. So he takes it out, carefully, and lays it flat over his desk, which is remarkably clean. It’s… lovely.

There’s a card at the bottom of the box. All it says is “007″.

“Huh,” R murmurs, and packs the cardigan away again.

He wears it the next day. It is quite comfortable.

~

When he finds a rat nibbling at the firewalls, he engages it in combat.

They are good. They are _very_ good. But they aren’t R. He defeats them, and sends a report to Boothroyd.

The rat returns the next day. And the next. And the next. R frowns, rebuilds the firewalls (after getting approval from Boothroyd, of course), and traces the source. No, it’s bouncing all over the globe. It would take him months to properly trace it, even if he were a robot (which he often wishes he were).

007 is killed at some point, but it’s barely a blip on R’s radar, even though everyone else goes into deep mourning.

006 walks into Q-branch the day after the announcement. He’s unshaven, unkempt, wild-eyed and hideously angry. He slams a bottle of some expensive scotch on R’s desk, making him twitch.

“Drink with me,” he demands.

“I’m busy,” R murmurs.

But 006 has already poured a generous serving into R’s empty tea-mug. R sighs quietly and obediently takes a sip. It’s very good.

006 sits beside R, brooding, watching him fight the Rat, drinking straight from the bottle. When the bottle is finished, 006 plants a wet kiss on R’s cheek and leaves.

R stares after him, surprised. It’s the first time anyone’s broken through his haze of coding since he was a child.

And the Rat takes the opening.

~

When the building blows, R survives, although his leg is broken by a falling chunk of ceiling.

Boothroyd does not survive.

At first, the news does nothing to him. Then something snaps in his chest. His chin wobbles. His eyes widen. His heart throbs with pain he’s not felt since the failed drowning.

And then he’s crying, sobbing, ugly and rusty and bent in half by this sudden up-welling of pain he’s never felt before. Not even when his little sister died in his arms. He clutches his chest and stomach and cries until his head is a solid cannonball of pain and his eyes feel ready to pop from their sockets and his throat is raw from restrained screams. How can anyone feel this kind of pain and survive?

Survive he does.

He will always survive.

He doesn’t want to anymore.

~

Maybe he’d loved Boothroyd, he doesn’t know. As a father, as a friend, it doesn’t matter. The point is that he shouldn’t have lived when a good man like Boothroyd is dead.

He tries to kill himself, injecting himself with immense quantities of morphine, but the doctors revive him. He will live. He _must_ live, they insist. He is Q now. He must live; he is Q now.

He wants to scream at them, claw at their eyes, for daring to suggest that R could ever take Boothroyd’s place. He wants to die. He just wants to die.

M herself comes to his hospital room and scolds him like a child. He cries again. Confesses. Confesses everything.

“I can’t,” he sobs when he’s wound down. “I can’t, I just can’t.”

“You can and you will,” M says with an iron will.

R will never believe her.

~

James and Alec visit the new Q. He’s still shaking, pale, fragile, like if you touched him wrong he’d shatter into dust; but he walks, and stands, and orders his subordinates around. They do as he says, quiet and obedient. The way the new Q had crumbled so completely, and then built his walls again in a night, is impressive. Frightening.

James and Alec have faced more than their share of frightening people. But the new Q still makes them uneasy.

Neither smile when Q looks at them. There’s a distant pain still in his eyes, and he doesn’t seem to see them.

“Ah, yes. You’re here for your kits,” Q says, and his voice is distant too. “Jenny can help you.”

James and Alec glance at each other. Then they move off to Jenny, who’s already got their briefcases out.

“How is he?” James asks lowly when they’re in reach.

Jenny chews her bottom lip, glancing at Q. “He’s… not good,” she whispered back. “He won’t use Q’s–Boothroyd’s office. He won’t eat. He won’t drink anything except tea. I think he’s seriously trying to kill himself.”

~

R is escorted to his cell, refuses food, drinks only subpar tea, reads John Keats until the letters begin to blur on the page. Then he curls up under his thin blanket and cries himself to sleep. As usual.

~

When Silva hacks them, he wants to die.

The only thing that keeps him from going to his office and overdosing on pain medication is 007 demanding his help.

“You do recall what happened the last time we tried this.”

“Please.”

Q is so desperate to repent, to repay, that he agrees. And he agrees again, when 007 asks for a trail of breadcrumbs. And he agrees quietly when 007 mutters, his voice cracked with grief, “We’re all fools, aren’t we?”

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to yell at me I have a tumblr, speaking-of-tailors (it's 4:49 in the fucking morning I'm not going to try and link it because I know I'll fuck it up)


End file.
